Question Reducing server load and page load times by moving rules from .htaccess to httpd.conf

[bzcomputers]

I was going to do some testing on moving .htaccess rules directly into httpd.conf to see if I could squeeze a little better performance overall out of vb4 in general. I personally have a substantial amount of rewrite rules already that I wanted to move from .htaccess to httpd.conf and figured to make the most of it at the same time I would move the DBSEO .htaccess requirements also.

Q1. Does DBSEO require "AllowOveride ALL" (.htaccess interpretation to be turned on) if the rules that are currently required by DBSEO in .htaccess are directly placed into httpd.conf?

Q2. Has DBTech tested/compared this themselves at any point?


For those with access to httpd.conf...
Moving the .htaccess rules into httpd.conf would make at least a minimal improvement, although it could be too small to detect for some. On the other hand, there could be a noticeable improvement. The more highly modified sites, including those the greatest number of .htaccess files and rewrite rules, and those with the highest traffic would see the greatest improvement. Considering that mod_rewrite interprets .htaccess rules on each request for a page, an image, a script, and a .css file. You could be talking about a lot of additional processing on some pages. Whereas if the rules are placed directly in httpd.conf the rules are only read once when the server is compiled (at restart) and from then on become native to the server and don't have to be reloaded or reinterpreted on all those requests.

 

[Fillip H.]

For purely handling DBSEO rewrite rules, I don't think moving it to httpd.conf will produce a significant benefit, considering how few rules are there. DBSEO handles all requests, and the rule is basically just a route, in the same way vB5's URLs are all routed through index.php and figured out from there.

That being said, it does provide an interesting idea: If we were somehow able to make it so that people could generate httpd.conf entries that handled all their URL formats, routing only the content it couldn't otherwise handle into dbseo.php, this could have a significant positive impact on performance.

That's more of a concept for the future, as it would involve a lot of testing, I would imagine.